Роберт Асприн - Forever After

“I blame myself for not keeping a closer eye on the supply,” Jancy said.

Calla frowned. “Well, still, there’d been that recruitment problem in Sandoz when we set out.”

‘The Duke had marched on Tzerchingia to battle the three-headed ogre and her minions,“ Jancy explained. ’There was a dearth of retainers in Sandoz unless we wanted to wait for the new crop of fifteen-year-olds to ripen.”

“Ah,” said the retainer sadly, with a nod of his hoary head. “Well, I’m sure a hero like yourself knows best, mistress. But to simple folk like us—”

He gestured with his grizzled jaw to indicate the retainers behind him.

“—it seems like a quest isn’t rightly a quest lessen you have proper retainers in it.”

Another retainer, an elf this time, nodded sagely. “And I do like a bit of cranberry sauce in the quest rations, too,” he said.

Jancy grimaced uncomfortably. “Well, we hired a fine lot of retainers as soon as we could,” she said. “At a low dive in the foreign quarter of Boroclost. Desperate men willing to murder their own grandmothers for a chance to put Princess Rissa on the throne of Caltus.”

“Two of them,” Sombrisio said. “Two retainers. One, two.”

“Well, they were pretty desperate,” Calla said mildly. “I know I didn’t feel comfortable turning my back on either of them.”

“Not a very impressive retinue,” Sombrisio said.

“Well, what did you want?” Jancy shouted. “We were flat broke, weren’t we? We’d been skedaddling for months from doom-ridden castle to monster-haunted mere, not to mention the Desolation of Thaumidor. Were we supposed to melt you down to pay for a proper mob of retainers?”

“Huh,” the ring said. “I’d like to have seen you try to melt me. If you’re a Third Age demigod, then I’m a soup tureen.”

A sepulchral bonging sounded deep within the mist-shrouded fastnesses of the swamp. The cluttering laughter of the bird skeletons ceased; reed bracts shivered with no wind to stir them.

Jancy Gaine untied the thong holding her buckler, then took Castrator into her right hand. She shrugged, loosing the powerful muscles of her shoulders so that she would be ready to react at an instant’s need.

“All right,” she said. “We’ll enter the swamp now.”

“Good lord!” said the hermit. “Why on Middle Earth would we want to do that?”

Jancy paused, feeling the noble set of her carriage slacken. “Huh?” she said. “Well, to venture boldly on our course to the Lost City of Anthurus and the accomplishment of our quest, of course.”

“Yes, all that,” said the hermit in barely controlled exasperation, “but we can’t go through the swamp . Those hummocks, they wouldn’t support a man.”

“And what about the horses, hey?” Sombrisio chortled. “They’d sink so far that you’d have to stack them on each other’s backs to have the ears of the top one break the surface!”

Jancy shot Castrator home with a violence that she’d really like to have worked off on a more deserving target. “Then why,” she bellowed, “did you lead us here? Is this the scenic tour of the Desolation of Thaumidor, is that it?”

“Well, no, I intended to follow the ridgeline, here,” the hermit said. “It’s better walking, you see, than down below.”

The hermit scuffed his sandal toe at the ground. The surface was hard as concrete. Salts deposited during the swamp’s periodic floods had combined with the light soil.

Jancy remembered the difficulty she’d had unpacking Sombrisio’s clay jacket when the invisible giant pursued them.

“Oh,” she said! “Well, let’s get going, then.”

“Never mind,” Sombrisio said, drawing out the syllables in a nasal whine. Judging from the ring’s continuing guffaws, it must have been a joke of some sort.

The sky was a bronze furnace. It should have been late afternoon, but Jancy hadn’t seen the sun since her party mounted the ridgeline.

The swamp to the right gurgled and shuddered. Once Jancy happened to be looking in that direction when a thirty-foot hole gaped in the surface of the water. It could have been a bubble bursting, of course, but she was sure she saw vomerine teeth deep in the watery gullet.

The hole slapped shut. Bulging eyes the size of wash-tubs blinked at Jancy, then closed again.

She grimaced and looked away. The party marched on.

A spiral of fine soil curled into the air on the left. It zigzagged along on a course roughly paralleling the ridge. The funnel’s spinning tip traced a broad line into the ground. A snake with scales like fire opals whirled aloft with the dust, striking in impotent fury at the air.

Jancy paused. “What’s that?” she said, pointing.

“Just a dust devil,” the hermit replied.

“But there’s no wind,” she snapped.

The initial funnel was already breaking up half a mile away, but four similar whirlwinds emerged on the left — desert — side of the ridgeline. These moved in unison, as if they were cutting tools milling away the surface of the ground.

“I didn’t say it was the wind,” the hermit said peevishly. “I said it was a dust devil. Obviously a number of them. Sometimes in the fall they swarm like locusts.”

Each of the immediate dust devils spun out a constellation of minivortices which grew larger as they rotated. The funnels climbed only a few hundred feet in the air. Their forms, insubstantial at first, became yellow-gray and then black as the air loaded itself with soil.

“They’re quite harmless, of course,” the hermit added. He sounded a little doubtful. “To humans.”

A prickly pear cactus beat its spiky lobes furiously. The plant was trying either to fly out of the vortex or to make the gripping funnel drop it. The dust devil spun its unintended prey lazily higher.

“Let’s keep moving,” Jancy ordered.

“And whose idea was it to stop an gawk in the first place?” said Sombrisio.

Logy with the dirt they had swallowed, the devils staggered farther desertward and spewed their meals in the near distance. Half a mile from Jancy’s party, a new ridge began to rise from what had been flat ground.

Calla Mallanik frowned. He peered not toward the dust devils but at the ground they were sweeping in their proliferating arcs. “Say,” the elf said. “There’s something down there.”

Then he added, “There’s a lot of somethings down there!”

Where the dust devils had scoured away the soil, the remains of an army entombed standing up appeared: Pointed steel caps, some of them bearing tattered ribbons tied to the peaks. Halberds and guisarmes, their blades forged in fanciful shapes and chased with designs in gold and orichalc and rich black niello.

Within the helmets, half-rotted faces covered by veils of silvered mail.

“Run!” cried the hermit, suiting his actions to his words. “It’s the buried army of Voroshek the Extremely Ill-Tempered the Fourth!”

It was an army, at least. The whole half-mile swath the dust devils were uncovering was planted with dried soldiers. Jancy couldn’t estimate how far the array extended alongside the ridge on which her party traveled, but she had to assume it was a long damned way.

“But they’re dead, aren’t they?” Jancy asked as she broke into a run alongside the hermit.

“Not exactly!” he replied, puffing out a syllable every time his right heel slammed down. “But they don’t move very fast!”

Mummified with the army were hump-shouldered mammoths. Their long hair, bleached russet during burial, fell out in handfuls as the beasts began to move. Gilded palanquins swayed on the mammoths’ backs, but the bowstrings of the archers within had rotted.

As the dust devils sucked loess from the feet of Voroshek’s soldiers, the army strode slowly toward the ridge along which Jancy’s party was by now in full flight. The lowering menace of the mummies’ advance was unmistakable.